आओ बसंत मनाएं

The Geet Kosh marks this 'Female-Others', its notation for a lead woman's voice with a supporting group, and the first line is a straightforward invitation to celebrate Basant, the spring festival. Seasonal numbers of this kind gave a 1940s film a set-piece with colour and movement without needing to advance the plot. As with every song in Pardesi Balam the words are Zahir Kashmiri's and the music Dr Inayat Husain Qureshi's; no singer is recorded by the Kosh or by myswar, which lists the title with its genre field left as unknown.

The Geet Kosh's 'Female-Others' marking is itself a musical fact: it tells us the number was built as a call-and-response between a soloist and a group, which is the standard construction for a festival song and implies a repeating, easily-answered mukhda over a steady cycle. No copy of the record is known to survive and myswar has no genre for it, so the arrangement — instrumentation, key, actual tempo — is undocumented.

Basant marks the turn of the year in North India, and its song tradition long predates cinema: the festival carries yellow, mustard fields, the end of cold, and in the Sufi lineage running back to Amir Khusrau it also carries a devotional charge. A film lyricist writing 'come, let us keep Basant' is therefore not inventing but joining, and the plainness of the line is the point — a chorus has to be singable on first hearing. It is worth noting how wide Kashmiri's range across this one soundtrack is: the same poet supplies this communal spring call, two desolate Urdu ghazals, a moral admonition and a Krishna bhajan.

Pardesi Balam was a Parkar Films production of Lahore, directed by M. A. Mirza for the producer Dr Anand Prakash Parkar, with the young Pran among a cast the Geet Kosh could only list because a collector in Karachi supplied the names decades later. All ten of its songs were written by Zahir Kashmiri and composed by Dr Inayat Husain Qureshi. No print, poster or synopsis survives, and myswar records the picture as unreleased, so the Geet Kosh's song index — first lines and a bracketed note on who sang each number on screen — is very nearly the whole of what is known about the film.

The song has no recorded afterlife — no surviving disc, no reissue, no singer name. Its one durable connection is biographical: Zahir Kashmiri's filmography of this period includes another undated 'Forties' title, Basant Panchmi, named for the same festival, alongside Ragini (1945), Kahan Gaye (1946) and Aaj Aur Kal (1947). For a film with no print and no confirmed release, that kind of cross-reference in a lyricist's credits is sometimes the only way an entry can be placed in time at all.